Alternative Android Market To House Banned Apps

sl4shd0rk writes "In contrast to the Apple's iron-fisted control over their App store, the Android Market is much more open. Google does, on occasion, remove apps it deems inappropriate, such as emulators, legally-questionable music services, tethering apps and one-click root apps. But if Koushik Dutta of CyanogenMod fame has his way, these heretic apps may have a home after all. Dutta plans an 'underground' Android Market complete with an approval process to weed out malicious applications; something Google doesn't do. Ideally, this will give Android users a more trustable source from which to get applications without having to resort to dictatorial software control."

Comments

Re:trust is the key element

[wbr1]

particularly if an app's been downloaded 5 million times.

Really.. that is not a good judgement. What if the app is a popular one, you decide to trust it, use it for 6 months, then get alerted to an update. You download the update, through the market, only to realize that your precious mission critical (to you) app, no is either ham-strung or personal info reporting malware. Basing an apps security off of it's popularity is not wise my friend. Hell, Melissa and ILOVEYOU got downloaded millions of times!

Non-infringing use must be substantial

[tepples]

I'm a bit confused to why Google has taken down all the emulators since they are used for legal purposes (see homebrew).

I asked about this on Fedora's legal mailing list once, and let me paraphrase the answer I got: The Betamax defense to contributory infringement of copyright requires a substantial non-infringing use. Two dozen homebrew games compared to a thousand infringing ROMs is not clearly substantial to the point where Red Hat would have an open-and-shut defense against Nintendo.